Reagan, In His Own Hand

...The scripts bristle with statistics--inflation rates, tax burdens, differences in productivity between the American and Soviet economies - showing a mind hungry for facts, not merely opinions...

...The president spent a moment trying to do just that...

...Not the speech as I had written it...

...And after deciding that Communism amounted to a "sickness" or a "disease" (May 1975) while the Soviet Union itself represented a "Godless tyranny" that had established a "hold on millions of helpless people" (October 1975), he wasn't going to let the State Department or the National Security Council persuade him that it would be unduly provocative to call for the demolition of the Berlin Wall...

...I can see him sitting at his desk writing, which he seemed to do all the time," Mrs...

...The drive lasted two-and-a-half hours...

...We ripped out walls and really gutted the place, so you couldn't stay there overnight...

...That's all there is to it...

...Yet it would be a mistake to see the book merely as a satisfying gift for liberals...

...Perhaps half a dozen people in the room were aware of what was taking place...

...It is startling only because he always made his performances look so easy...

...They fell slowly, like fat snowflakes, scattering themselves across the floor...

...Then something terrible happened...

...Name: (Please Print) Address: City: State: Zip: Date of change: VCAFRM ed his own shorthand...

...3. Return this form to us at the address listed below...

...As Reagan, In His Own Hand makes clear, Ronald Reagan got to be so good at public speaking in the same way that Laurence Olivier got to be so good at acting or Vladimir Horowitz got to be so good at playing the piano...

...On the way up to the ranch, Reagan sat in the back seat, writing...

...The hotel's ventilating system kicked on...

...Reagan preferred the short form - the editors confess that the two full-length books that Reagan ostensibly authored, Where's the Rest of Me and An American Life, were indeed ghosted -and he wrote conversationally, composing for the ear rather than the eye...

...I don't ever remember Ronnie sitting and watching television....When I picture those days [before Reagan became president] it's him sitting behind that desk...

...hotel...

...But survive it did - more than 600 radio scripts...

...While doing that a thought came to me apropos of the present world situation where we continue to believe we can maintain a detente with the Soviet U...

...Reagan had academics, the press, much of Congress, and on occasion even senior members of his own administration demanding that he moderate his views...

...The Union of Concerned Scientists still opposes a ballistic missile defense...

...working...

...His most recent book is entitled It's My Party: A Republican's Messy-Love Affair with the GOP...

...To cram speech material onto 4x6 cards and, later, half sheets, Reagan inventSCHOLARSHIPS The American Alternative Foundation (formerly the American Spectator Educational foundation) is offering two types of scholarships for the academic year 2001-02...

...As president of the screen actors' guild, as spokesman for General Electric, as governor of California, and as a three-time presidential candidate, Reagan wrote newsPETER ROBINSON is a fellow at the Hoover Institution...

...Morris, IL 61054-8084 1-800-524-3469 IMPORTANT: Allow six weeks for address change...

...Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...

...Reagan wrote incessantly...

...Above all, it makes untenable the lingering perception of Reagan as a genial dolt...

...Ronald Reagan read widely, wrote constantly, thought for himself, and paid ideas the supreme compliment of acting upon them...

...Reagan, In His Own Hand proves that it is the right word all the same...

...Instead he seems to have begun thinking about politics seriously when he was middle-aged, undergoing a journey away from the politics of his youth...

...Gorbachev, tear down this wall...

...The material that Skinner uncovered seems to have survived only because a secretary saved it from Reagan himself...

...Then we'd drive back...

...It is the last word Reagan's enemies would care to see associated with him, and I suppose it may bring a smile even to the lips of some of his friends...

...When I visited him in 1990,1 found him with a yellow legal pad on his desk, a pen in his hand...

...There was that poetry from whence comes the inscription on our statue of liberty: "Her name - Mother of Exiles...

...For example, the morning after returning from one of his first summit meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev, Reagan reported on the summit in a speech he delivered in a Washington, D.C...

...Very little material in Reagan's own hand survives from the crucial period between 1948, when he campaigned for Truman, and 1964, when he gave his famous speech on behalf of Barry Gold-water...

...The editors quote Dennis LeBlanc, who drove Reagan back and forth from Los Angeles to the ranch he bought in 1975 in the hills above Santa Barbara...

...The scripts deal with every issue of the day, from stagflation to Soviet duplicity, and they bear out what the old Reagan hands have always said: Right up until he became president, when he no longer had the time, Reagan did most of his writing himself...

...Frustrated that his contact lenses made it impossible for him to achieve eye contact with his audiences, Reagan trained himself to deliver remarks wearing just one lens: Glancing down at his cards, he would focus through one eye, and then, raising his head to the audience, he would focus through the other eye...

...Yet we now know that he produced more original writing than any president since Woodrow Wilson...

...Think for a moment about his technical proficiency...

...In passing the tax cuts of 1982 and 1986, he overruled much of his own senior staff...

...2. Attach the mailing label from your most recent issue...

...Reagan reverted to his writing habit when he left the White House...

...The press, which only saw, or heard, the finished rhetorical product, dubbed Reagan the Great Communicator...

...He was so good at giving speeches that his skill as an orator has become a standard part of presidential lore, like FDR's wiliness or Clinton's libido...

...For seniors or recent graduates, postgraduates scholarships of S5000 to take the intensive 12-week course conducted by the National Journalism Center Washington, DC in preparation for entering into a career in journalism...

...In the act of delivering it, in other words, tine president was composing an entirely new speech...

...He strode to the lectern as he was announced, and then, as was his unvarying practice, acknowledged the applauding audience with his right hand while with his left hand he reached into his jacket pocket to pull out the half sheets- the half sheets were just that, ordinary pieces of typing paper that had been cut in half-on which his speech was typed, setting them on the lectern while he told an opening joke...

...Reagan was an intellectual...

...Then, when he reached a block of material that I had written, it came from the middle of the speech...

...64 February 2oo ~ The American Spectator...

...Reagan, In His Own Hand will appear in February...

...Yet we know that in his twenties Reagan was an ardent Democrat, that as late as the age of 37 he campaigned for Harry Truman, and that it was not until he was 51 that he became a Republican...

...Reagan himself, it seems, could hardly have cared less about the historical record...

...Or so those who worked with him have always claimed...

...At least you would have thought so if you had written the speech...

...After concluding that federal taxes were "confiscatory" (December 1976), Reagan wasn't about to let his staff talk him into trimming taxes here and there instead of cutting taxes wholesale...

...For that matter, if he was the simpleton his detractors believed, he might have spent the time telling old Hollywood stories...

...Instead of taking an awkward amount of time to put everything back in order, he had simply launched into a speech, glancing down to find blocks of material that went together while improvising transitions...

...Reagan's work is relaxed, fluid, vivid, humorous, and pointed...

...Reagan recalls in an interview with the editors of Reagan, In His Own Hand...

...Box 655, Mt...

...He could pull off anything...

...First he ad-libbed...

...On the return trip, Reagan, already well into his sixties, might have napped...

...DC 20004-2424 e -mail: TAMAC TE@.com The American Spectator February 2001 63 A The American Spedator MOVING...

...H ow did he get to be so good...

...The audience began shifting a The book makes untenable the lingering perception of Reagan as a genial dolt...

...By the time he became president he had spent decades both steeping himself in public affairs and engaging in the one act that above all others enables a man to know his own mind: putting his thoughts down on paper...

...The president himself remained calm, smiling gamely as he bent to scoop up the sheets...

...Just be sure to allow six weeks for your change to take effect...

...To everyone who still permits himself to think of Reagan as a simpleton, Reagan, In His Own Hand will prove both unpleasant and impossible to ignore, a dead mouse among the ladyfingers at the garden party for good liberals...

...If you prefer that your name not be rented, please check here...

...Speaking in Berlin, Reagan delivered the now-famous line, "Mr...

...For undergraduates who will be juniors or seniors: A one-year scholarship of $5000 for journalists/writers who espouse traditional American values...

...Nobody ever thought that he read anything," Mrs...

...Except that it wasn't the speech...

...This implies that Reagan stopped thinking when he left Des Moines for Hollywood at the age of 26...

...They were out of order...

...Reagan tells the editors...

...When the audience stopped laughing, the president looked up and began the speech...

...The first few moments of the president's performance proved entirely routine...

...The conventional explanation holds that Reagan absorbed the simple values of the small-town Midwest where he grew up...

...Instead, LeBlanc reports, "when we drove back...

...Renew my subscription for one year (ten issues--S34.95) . Payment enclosed . Bill me later . At various times TAS rents its subscriber lists to other organizations...

...It was one of those moments when a cliche comes true: the audience really did gasp...

...But it was not easy to persuade him to change...

...He shuffled through the deck of half sheets to find the first, placed it on top of the deck, shuffled again to find the second, placed it on top, then he began shuffling yet again to find the third...

...When they gave him their typescripts, Reagan cheerfully ripped up his originals, letting them flutter into a wastebasket...

...And they return again and again to American history, quoting the Founders and discussing the Constitution (the book includes a stout defense of the Electoral College), demonstrating that Reagan examined the issues of his day in light of enduring American political traditions...

...In other words, he expressed himself in the manner of popular culture...

...I was going through a bundle of quotations I've collected over the years," Reagan wrote in August 1978...

...We exchanged alarmed glances...

...BOOK SIN REVIEW How Reagan Did It Reagan, In His Own Hand Edited by Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson Free Press /576pages / $30 REVIEWED BY Peter Robinson O ne day in 1998, while working her way through boxes containing the private papers of Ronald Reagan, an assistant professor of history named Kiron Skinner discovered scripts in Reagan's own handwriting for the five-minute, five-day-a-week radio spots that he broadcast in the late seventies...

...TAS Address Changes Made Easy...

...Then Reagan and LeBlanc would put in a full day of work...

...The radio scripts in the book cite dozens of newspaper columns, magazine articles, and learned volumes, indicating that Reagan read steadily...

...Detente -isn't that what a farmer has with his turkey-until thanksgiving day...

...Which brings us to Reagan's ideological tenacity...

...Now that I'm out of office," he told me with a grin, "I have time to get back to writing my speeches myself...

...Yet Reagan, In His Own Hand demonstrates the way he must have reached his positions...

...In some quarters, the incontrovertible proof that Reagan could actually read and write was enough to cause a sensation...

...Soon a major publisher agreed to bring out excerpts of the material, working with Skinner and two old Reagan advisers, Martin and Annelise Anderson...

...He worked at it...

...paper columns, radio spots, and speeches numbering in the many thousands...

...But he was a voracious reader...

...1. Please write your new address in the space provided...

...How that contrasts with these words of the Soviet U's founding father...

...Reagan, In His Own Hand provides the answer...

...Then it came to me...

...Applications must be postmarked no later than March 31.2001...

...he was just always writing...

...The American Alternative Foundation 1299 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Suite 800W Washington...

...If I don't put this speech back in order pretty soon," the president quipped, still shuffling, "I'm going to have to tell another joke...

...During his eight years as president, it was on display again and again...

...even though the State Department and National Security Council had mounted an effort, led, it is worth noting, by Colin Powell, to drop it...

...Lenin: "It would not matter if 3/4 of the human race perished...

...Then we smiled...

...All he did was give it a lifetime of unremitting effort...

...But the book is useful in a number of ways...

...Repeatedly, he manages to compress into a few informal paragraphs an entire world view...

...To those of us 62 February 2001 The American Spectator who have always admired the fortieth president, the book proves satisfying in a different way...

...When he announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, he flouted the opinion not only of many in his administration but of virtually the entire American scientific establishment...

...Where did he get his self-assurance...

...Issuing from a ceiling vent directly over the lectern, a sudden blast lifted the half sheets into the air...

...I pulled out my own copy of the speech and tried to figure out what was going wrong...

...The president delivered the speech without so much as a pause, a stumble, or an "uh...

...Mail to: Subscriber Service P.O...

...Those of us who helped produce his speeches (I served for six years as a speech-writer in the Reagan White House) found ourselves constantly marveling at feats of which the press was never aware...

...When he replaced them on the lectern, however, he had a problem...

...The editors include a few other manuscript items, including speeches, that have since been discovered...

...As the editors explain, Reagan composed in longhand, usually on yellow legal pads, then had secretaries type his work...

...Although they were numbered, re-ordering them was going to take about as much time as it would to put a deck of cards back in order...

...Aside from private correspondence and a few items dating from Reagan's earliest years -stories he wrote in high school and college and a handful of newspaper columns from his days as an Iowa sports announcer - the radio scripts that Skinner discovered represent the only body of material in Reagan's own hand...

...the important thing is that the remaining 1/4 be communist...

...He constantly rewrote speeches, adding material to keep his presentations fresh...

...in its seats...

...Could he pull it off...

...The trouble is, without any material in Reagan's own handwriting they were never able to defend him against the charge that his material was ghosted...

...Word of Skinner's findings began to circulate among historians...

...It explains how Reagan did it...

...Koran application, write ore mail us at the address below...

...There is a word for this kind of person...